We may be sure that the Christians in the East could not possibly have held their own against the Saracens, as they did during these years, if they had not been constantly receiving reinforcements from the West. History speaks to us of certain definite dates for the first, second, third Crusades, and so on, but we also have to imagine a continual going to and from the East of knights with larger or smaller followings. In this way the strength of the garrisons in the kingdom were maintained, and in this way happened that continual bringing of Eastern ideas to the West, which was really of more importance in the making of this greatest of all stories than any of the victories won or cities taken. {139} CHAPTER XVI THE SLAVS IN EASTERN EUROPE Thus I have tried to give a picture in outline--a cinematograph, or moving picture--of the world after the break up of Charlemagne's Empire. We see the Turks pressing up against the Eastern Empire in Asia Minor, with the result that the Emperor appeals to the West, and that the first Crusade establishes, for nearly a hundred years, the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. African Mahommedans have possession of the strip of North Africa running from Egypt--Egypt itself being held by the Turks--till they meet another Mahommedan African people which has possession of the southern part of Spain. That same power had the whole of the Spanish peninsula in its grip a little earlier, but its own divisions, of Arabs, Africans, and Syrians, made it weak, and it was broken as soon as it came against any organised force. Then in Italy we see that the Pope, aided by the Emperors and giving them the aid of the growing power of the Church in return, is on the whole establishing his temporal power in Rome more and more firmly. In the south of Italy and in Sicily the enterprising Normans drive out the Saracens and take possession. Northward, the great territory which, together with Italy, had been Charlemagne's, has been split into the two large divisions, the kingdoms of France and of Germany. But in these so-called kingdoms the king was at this time only a little more powerful than his lords, the barons and big {140} landowners. The feudal system prevailed, and the king was constantly engaged with the hard task of keeping his feudal lords in order. It was disorder, rather than order, that was the rule all over the unhappy world. England fared a little better, thanks to the Channel which cut it off and made its conditions different from those of the Continent. But now it has been conquered by the Norman, and we have to see how that conquest had the result, for a very long while, of counteracting the effect of the Channel as a separating barrier. England was soon caught up into the continental turmoil.